in many cases He has made [our] judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices [by a self-assumed power], and sent hither swarms of new officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies [and ships of war] without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject usto a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legisla tion; same absolute rule into these [States]; for colonies taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments; for suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here [withdrawing his governors and declaring us out of his allegiance and protection.] He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. by declaring protection us out of his and waging war against us. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy [] unworthy the head of a scarcely pacivilized nation. He has constrained our fellow-citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. ralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally mestic insur among us, He has [] endeavoured to bring on the excited doinhabitants of our frontiers the merciless rections Indian savages, whose known rule of war- and has fare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions [of existence.] [He has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property. free He has waged cruel war against human nature itself; violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.] In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injuries. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a [] people [who mean to be free. Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adven tured, within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay a foundation so broad and undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom.] an unwarrant able Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend [a] jurisdiction over [these our States.] We have re- us minded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here, [no one of which could warrant so strange a pretension; that these were effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or strength of Great Britain: that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league and amity with them: but that submission to their Parliament was no part of our Constitution, nor ever in idea, if history may be credited: and] we [ ] appealed to have their native justice and magnanimity [as and we have well as to] the ties of our common kin- by dred to disavow these usurpations which [were likely to] interrupt our connection would ineviand correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. [, and when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony they have, by their free election, re-established them in VOL. I.-2* conjured them tably power. At this very time too, they are per-. mitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. We might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below their dignity. Be it so since they will have it. The road to happiness and to glory is open to us We will tread it apart from them, and] [] acquiesce in the necessity which deand hold them nounces our [eternal] separation [ ]! We must therefore as we hold the rest of man kind, enemies in war, in peace friends. too. We therefore the Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled appealing to the Supreme do, in the name and by the Judge of the world for authority of the good peothe rectitude of our inten-ple of these [States, reject tions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are and of right and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the Kings of Great Britain and all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve |